The present invention relates generally to the field of software development and testing, and more particularly to determining an importance of an artifact, such as a test case or a defect, in a software development environment, based on parameters available within the environment.
Development of a software system may go through a number of phases that include requirement gathering, system development, testing, and acceptance. Each phase may comprise a number of sub-phases. For example, the testing phase may include test planning, test case generation, test plan execution, and test result analysis. During the testing phase, the objective of a test case is to fail during execution and thereby indicate that a potential illegal behavior of the system was uncovered. Within a test run a collection of test cases is planned to be executed against a specific version of the system under test (SUT).
In each of the software development phases, a multitude of artifacts may be created, for example, artifacts related to the testing phase may include test cases, defect records, analysis results, and change requests. There may be a variety of software defects, for example, failure of a designed function, a missing function, or presence of a removed function. Management of the software defects is part of the software development lifecycle and may involve artifacts from different phases of the software development. The artifacts may be stored in various databases to facilitate management of the artifacts.